commerce essay

Anita Roddick The Body Shop Commerce Essay

Published: 23, March 2015

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Moore and Buttner defined female entrepreneurs as those who use their knowledge and resources to develop or create new business opportunities, who are actively involved in managing their businesses, and own at least 50 percent of the business have been in operation for longer than a year". In this 21st century, women had a dramatically changing over the year and year. Women breakthrough from the traditional position that as an internal housewife to a working woman in several fields. Nowadays, more and more women try to get rid of work as an office woman and get fixed salary every month but they are tries to set up and develop their own business. Since women's level of education has increasing compare to 20 century, they create their own business based on their high knowledge, skills and interest in several field. There Women not only successful in business field but also other field including political, medical, economic, cosmetic, IT technology, oil and gas, software, food and beverage and so on. This is because there is more support for women entrepreneurs than ever before. However, women entrepreneur are facing constraints and there are solutions for them to improve themselves.

Successful Woman Entrepreneurs

There are a lot of successful women entrepreneurs who start their business by themselves. They have their own strategies and uniqueness of their products and also management skills that enable their business went for globally.

Anita Roddick- The Body Shop

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Anita Roddick the founder of The Body Shop. She was born in England in 1942 and married with Gordon Roddick in year 1970 and had 4 children. Anita Roddick started her business in year 1976 where her shop allocated at a back street in Brighton, England. Without much of financing, she only able decorated her shop with green garden lattice to cover the ugly unpainted walls.

Anita Roddick got her inspire of her products is when she travel to around the world. She saw local women of Tahiti use cocoa butter to plastering their body and women in Morocco washing hair in mud. After that, Anita Roddick tried to make her own products by using all natural raw materials from fruits and vegetables at home and sales her products in her first shop. She had packaging her products in very simple packaging and inexpensive price for all natural cosmetics and herbal creams and shampoos. She only sold 15 different cosmetic products in her first shop.

The first strategy that used by Anita Roddick is differentiate her products with other cosmetic products where her products is all made from natural raw materials such as from fruits and vegetables. This is because of her awareness of most women fear of use artificial chemicals cosmetic products to put on their skin and hair. She had got natural raw materials most from Africa and these natural raw materials made her products unique compared to others. Through this, she built her product brand name which The Body Shop sales all natural cosmetic products.

The second strategy used by Anita Roddick is CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). According to ISO Strategic Advisory Group defined CSR as "is taken to mean a balanced approach for organizations to address economic, social and environmental issues in a way that aims to benefit people, communities and society". Anita Roddick used CSR strategies as a way to make advertising indirectly to community. She joined Fair Trade Community where she got her natural raw materials from Africa and paid them in a fair price to help them have extra fund to build their facilities such as school and others. Furthermore, she also prevents to use animals tested for her products. Moreover, she join society communities to raise the concern about environmental friendly, protect animals and against animal testing and defend for human rights. Through CSR, she had successful to build good reputation for her shop.

Third, Anita Roddick able to manage the relationship between employer and employee where she said" mutual responsibilities between employer and employee are I educate you, you educate me, I help you, you help me; together we are help others". She treated her employees as partner together to run their business and do well in society responsibility. She also said that "one of our major strength is leadership where leadership is not commandership, it is about managing future". This minded of Anita Roddick encourage and enables her employees work happily with her.

Anita Roddick is a successful woman entrepreneur where she is an ambition, confident and not fearful to create her own business. Furthermore, she is awareness to the opportunity in the market and able to take risk to start her business. Anita Roddick said "I believe that we should challenge everything, because what we are taught is not always the best we need to know and I also believe that you do not need to know a lot, or have financial science to do well in business, you just have to be able to learn". A good attitude can make a good entrepreneur. Anita Roddick successful to run her business around the world with had 1300 shops worldwide.

Cher Wang- High Technology Computer (HTC) Corporation

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Cher Wang is the founder of HTC Corporation in year 1997. She is also the founder of VIA Technologies Inc in year 1987. She has born at Taiwan in year 1958. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley for a Master of Economics. She is married and with two children. She is currently the chairwoman for both of the company. In age of fifteen, Cher Wang was sent to San Francisco by her father. The purpose was wanted Cher Wang to learn live independent life and fumble her own personality. Her father YC Wang, a billionaire businessman never expected that her daughter who love music will became one of the persons who lead the IT technology and compete with Apple Inc, Intel Inc, Samsung and other IT Technology corporation.

Although her father is a billionaire businessman, she never asked for any cent from her father to start up HTC Corporation. She raise fund by loan the house belongs to her mother to bank. After that, she encouraged HT Cho and Peter Chou to launch the HTC Corporation with her. Since then, several HTC hand phones and smart phones launched to market and compete with Apple and Samsung, Nokia, Sony and others.

Cher Wang shared in the Economics Newspaper in Taiwan on 15 June 2012, she said that "a successful business require for several different elements, as long as to master the seven core values which are vision, integrity, enthusiasm, innovation, partnership, humility and experience, thus can achieve the successful of entrepreneurial".

She also said that "innovation is the driving force to changes our life, this is continuous improvement of human life to be more efficiency and excellence. An entrepreneur must a keen powers of observation and empathetic, continuously to contribute, just can bring the changing to the community". Thus, she is able to catch up the trend of technologies and survival until today.

Cher Wang is active in the international business community. She joined World Economic Forum and also a member of the APEC Business Adivisory Council (ABAC). At here, she identify capacity-building policy recommendations that encourage opportunities for women in business.

She has become the richest businesswoman in Taiwan in 2011 and also one of the Forbes Asia's 50 Power Businesswomen in 2012.

Constraints Faced by Women Entrepreneurs

According to Muhammad Usama 's view, "the constraints faced by women entrepreneurs may came from their own personality, family, or from the environment in which they exist and the societal expectations and perceptions of the people around them". Based on the statement above, can't deny that those factors caused many of women scare to step out their feet to be a woman entrepreneur. Constraints faced by women entrepreneur are from two levels which are individual level and firm level.

Social and cultural barrier

In the workplace point of view in between the older or senior citizen's perception. In the study by Barwa, on women entrepreneur in Vietnam, they found that woman faced additional handicaps due to the prevailing social and cultural gender-based inequalities and biases. Women entrepreneur confront in accessing credit from formal institution is magnified in view of their limited access to formal education, ownership of properties and social mobility. Cultural constraint is an additional obstacle that inhibits the efficient conduct of business for women.

Personality

Most of the women may lack of confident and negative attitude of their personal. Female business women nowadays faced with low confidence, even they have the knowledge and skills, the abilities to run their business, but they fear of fail and fear to try on run their own business.

Role conflict

Women entrepreneur of the northeast was faced the conflict in balancing time between the entrepreneur venture and their family. They are a wife for a husband, they also a mother to children, daughter to their parents, a employer for their employee. Thus, they have several of tasks to complete and this cause them unable to managing their time between work and family.

2.4 Financially affected / discriminating finance provider

According to Kapoor and Pooja, finance is a most important aspect to starting or developing a business, non providing of long term financing or its financial ability has limited the women entrepreneur. Having access to property right and land is essential for women entrepreneur because property is used as collateral for business credit. The lack of property and land ownership translates directly into women's inability to access bank financing need for the business. Due to the socialization impact, women entrepreneur have not taken financial management seriously. Hence lack of credit and affecting the business.

Lack of education and unawareness of health problem

In this area, a few evidence can be describe as women lack of self awareness towards self-management. Impact from heavy schedule and lack of time for rest and sleep and a lot of household work leading to mental tension and fatigue. The factors contributed to women entrepreneur into slow growth progression. School enrolment side, as expected about twice as many women and men in rural area have no education at all compared with those in urban area. While, the gender gap in primary education in Kenya has decrease in recent years, the gap remains high at secondary and tertiary education level. Women are much less likely to enroll in public universities, national polytechnic, and technical institute.

2.6 Lack of managerial and training skills

In Uganda, women entrepreneur in rural areas suffer from a lack of training and advisory services that would allow them to upgrade their managerial and technical skills and solve immediate production problems, thus increase productivity.

The growth and the competitiveness of this sector are hampered by a lack of managerial and technical skills, weak infrastructure, difficulty in accessing loans, and complicated company registration processes. Women entrepreneur in morocco faced a lack of operational and managerial skill resulting in low productivity and competitiveness.

A study by Richardson, Howarth and Finnegan stated that in Africa, many reveal that women entrepreneur feel they lack abilities, skill, and expertise in certain business matters. Many of issues mentioned that women relatively lack of exposure to world business. Consequently, women networks are poorly developed as social assets. This in turn impact on a range of factors that adversely affect the women entrepreneur at all level.

Labor related issue

To access information and access to network is the issues in United state. While in Korea, they faced and experiencing financing and the effort to balance work and family as their most difficult task. According to Gordon, Indonesian women entrepreneur have their difficulties in exporting their product overseas and in increasing the volume of production, both of which are of importance for their competition in global market.

Especially at start up phase, women entrepreneur faced on the problem of marketing and labor difficulties and disagreement with associates.

Marketing related issue

Processing of marketing of product women entrepreneur faced certain problems which were poor location of shop, lack of transport facility and tough competition from larger and established units. Raw material production problems resulting slow growth of women entrepreneurs. Other was the non availability of machine or equipment, lack of training facility and non availability of labor. Major factor was high cost of require machine and equipment.

Conclusion

Anita Roddick and Cher Wang is the successful woman entrepreneur who I admire since I used their products. The strategies used by Anita Roddick and the seven core value by Cher Wang are the factors enabled them to be successful. I should learn from them as I would like to be a successful woman entrepreneur like them. However, if want to be a successful woman entrepreneur, I should overcome the constraints above by join seminar, training and get knowledge and experience from university.

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